Second Place Victory
by karatam
Summary: The colour of your hair is close enough.


**Rating**: PG-13  
><strong>Pairin<strong>**g/Characters**: Quinn/Santana (past Brittana and Faberry)  
><strong>Spoilers:<strong> none  
><strong>Word Length: <strong>1150**  
>Summary<strong>: The colour of your hair is close enough.  
><strong>Disclaimer<strong>: All characters belong to Fox and Ryan Murphy. No copyright infringement is intended and no profit is being made from this work of fiction.

/ /

It started at a party.

(For them, everything seemed to start at a party.

They met at a birthday party Brittany threw. Santana knew Brittany through school and Quinn knew her through gymnastics. They had laid eyes on each other and Santana had seen a kindred spirit.

Not that she would admit it at the time.)

It was at a frat house, just to confirm every stereotype of the American girl's college experience. There was a beer pong tournament happening in the backyard, red plastic cups fill to the brim with whatever beer was cheapest at the liquor store that day. It left a sticky taste in the back of Santana's mouth, but she had done enough shots that she didn't really care anymore.

The boy who brought her to the party wasn't a girl. (This was obvious but she felt it needed repeating in her head to convince her that she could do this. She could be normal in as many senses as she could manage.) He was tall, thickly muscled – _a football jock,_ she thought absently – and most importantly not a blond.

(Because there was one person, one person who wasn't at Yale, who wasn't on the East Coast at all, who was blonde. And Santana wanted to forget about her most days.

Other days all she wanted to do was remember.

Remember giggling together under the sheets. Remember gently linking fingers while walking through the park on a clear sunny day. Remember waking up to blonde hair draped across her face and blue eyes looking down at her.

It hurt to remember, because _she was gone_.)

Santana didn't expect to meet anyone she really knew at the party; she just wanted to get drunk, like any other Friday.

But as always, long blonde hair caught her eye.

She was pouring more beer into her cup when she saw it and got so distracted that she didn't realize her cup was overflowing until liquid hit her shoe and trickled in to touch her toes. She stopped pouring but otherwise didn't move. She couldn't.

Brittany wasn't supposed to be here, wasn't supposed to be anywhere near here. She was in Los Angeles with Mike, trying to make it as a dancer. They had said goodbye on the steps of Santana's house the day before Brittany left. Santana was supposed to go to the airport, but she couldn't make herself open her own front door.

The girl with the long blonde hair turned around. It wasn't Brittany.

"Santana?"

It was, however, Quinn Fabray.

She had known, somewhat abstractly, that Quinn went to school on the East Coast, but had always assumed Harvard for some reason. But here she was, standing in a frat house near the Yale campus, a red cup in her left hand.

"Hey Quinn."

When they were face to face, Santana could see that Quinn had changed, in little ways. She was thinner, but it was the thinner of not caring enough to eat, not the thinner of diet and exercise and a healthy lifestyle. Santana could always tell the difference. And her eyes, those famous hazel eyes, were tired. Quinn looked world weary at the age of nineteen.

"You here with someone?"

(But Santana could hear the other question in Quinn's voice: _is Brittany here?_

And she didn't want to answer that if Quinn didn't already know.)

"Yeah, uh, Derek, I think."

"You think?"

"Fuck you, Fabray."

"Fuck you too, Lopez."

And it gave Santana an idea, one that she didn't articulate, but it stayed at the back of her brain, waiting. So she took a sip of her beer and smirked, though the expression felt unfamiliar on her face.

(She didn't smile or laugh or even smirk as much as she used to. Brittany had taken them with her on a flight to the west.

She had taken a lot of things with her. Santana's chest still felt too empty.)

They stood together, maybe slightly closer than most friends would, and talked for a while, carefully avoiding topics they both knew would hurt.

It didn't leave a lot of topics left. A lot of things hurt.

They never quite figured out how they got into an empty bedroom when they thought back on it later. There was a different drink in both their glasses and Santana's shirt was mostly undone.

(It had actually been months since she had sex, as surprising as that was.

When she left Ohio for Connecticut – and _shit,_ how much did she not fit in sometimes – she had sex with almost every guy or girl who looked her way. It had worked before, distracting her from that aching pull in her chest.

And it had worked again, until it stopped. And so she had stopped too.)

Quinn pulled back, her eyes a little hazy and not really looking at Santana's face, which Santana would have normally found insulting, but she wasn't really looking at Quinn's face either.

"She left."

"I know."

"She said goodbye and she left me."

"She left me too, for the bright lights and the stage."

They weren't talking about the same person. They both knew that. They knew each other well enough.

They never seemed to get the one thing they wanted the most. No matter how hard they tried, it always managed to slip through their fingers.

It left them angry for a long while, but that anger eventually turned into sadness and then into a resigned acceptance. Happiness just wasn't in the cards for them, so they took the next best thing.

Santana lifted a hand and twirled a lock of Quinn's soft blond hair around her index finger. She ignored the tears building up in her eyes. She felt an answering tug on her own hair and glanced up to see Quinn looking at her steadily. "The colour of your hair is close enough."

Quinn's smile was sad, her lips fighting to remain curled upwards. "Same with yours."

In the morning, Santana slipped her shirt up onto her shoulders while Quinn picked up her skirt from the floor.

"Do you feel better?" Quinn asked.

Santana looked over to see Quinn studying her. She thought about it for a moment, felt that aching pull in her chest, testing it. "A little bit, maybe. You?"

"Relief, I guess. It's nice not having to explain things." The look on Quinn's face was wry, almost bitter, and Santana knew just what she meant.

Santana picked up her purse and put her hand on the doorknob. "I'll see you around, Fabray." And she meant it.

"See you around, Lopez." Quinn smiled, soft and tired.

Santana smiled back and it didn't feel quite as foreign as it had the night before.

This wasn't happiness. This wasn't love.

But for them, in that moment, it would do.


End file.
